The Charge That I Bribed Your Secretary

Your letter goes on: “Please do not trouble yourself to give a large sum of gold to bribe my secretary, as your friends did in the case of my papers containing On First Principles, before they had been corrected and finished, so that they could more easily falsify documents that no one had, or at least very few. Accept the document I send you free of charge, though you would gladly pay a large sum to buy it.” [a]

I should have thought you would be ashamed of such an opening. What! I bribe your secretary! Is there anyone who would try to compete with the wealth of Croesus and Darius? Who does not tremble when he is suddenly faced with a Demaratus or a Crassus? Have you become so brazen that you put your trust in lies, and think that lies will protect you, and that we will believe every fiction you choose to make up? Who was it, then, who stole from the cell of our brother Eusebius that letter in which you were so highly praised? Whose cunning was it, and whose accomplices, that caused a certain document to be found in the lodgings of that Christian woman Fabiola and of that wise man Oceanus, which they themselves had never seen? Do you think you are innocent because you can throw onto others all the charges that properly belong to you? Is everyone who offends you, however guiltless and harmless he may be, at once held to be a criminal? You think so, I suppose, because you possess the thing that broke down the chastity of Danaë, the thing that had more power with Gehazi than his master’s holiness, the thing for which Judas betrayed his Master.